Doctor, your patient is going to breach…

Much has been made in the media about the number of people breaching the four-hour target. There is also a shocking lack of understanding of what the four-hour target actually means.

The target is not for patients to be seen by a doctor in four hours. The target involves patients being booked in at the front desk, assessed by nurses, triaged by frontline Consultants, having blood tests and other investigations performed, being fully clerked and examined by another doctor, having a diagnosis made, being referred to a specialty team, and then leaving the department to go to a bed on the ward, or being discharged home.

I don’t have to point out that the potential for delay here is almost unquantifiable.

During my shifts in ED I would frequently pick up patients who had twenty minutes to go. I would sometimes pick up patients who had already breached. Usually, these patients had been streamed to the urgent care centre, and then referred on to ED. Because it is technically the same department, they come through on the same clock… So, from the point of view of the four-hour target, we have failed before we have even started.

The target has good and bad points. It is an arbitrary, statistically useful but morally obsolete tool, to aid us in defining our parameters and assessing our performance. It is as useful or useless as any predetermined timeframe, and the number itself is not the issue. The problem occurs due to the fixation on the target above other priorities. Used properly, the target helps us identify areas of weakness, and departments that are struggling to see their patients safely. In an ideal world, departments with more breaches should get more funding, for higher staffing levels, for increased number of observation beds, for larger majors areas. In reality, breaching leads to stressful conditions, forced decision-making, and compromised patient safety.

There are a few funny internet memes floating around about the ED. One of them states “save three people’s lives and no one bats an eyelid; breach one patient and all hell breaks loose.” I have been blessed with working in an ED where there are excellent working relationships amongst the staff, and patient safety is consistently a priority. Even so, I have often felt pressured to make a quicker decision about a patient, to take down the half bag of saline still running, to amend the timing of my medical entries in order to have one less breach.

Quite often, the balance of admission or discharge in ED hinges on a period of observation. It is impossible to accurately assess a patient’s condition in 20 minutes. The luxury of allowing them to sit in the department, with regular observations, and pain relief/a bag of fluids is often all that is needed to avoid an acute admission. Where I am working currently, they have recently reduced the number of ED observation beds from 20 to 4. This is in order to build a much-needed Acute Medical Unit, which in turn helps free up the ED by providing an exit strategy for medically accepted patients. However, this has significantly reduced the number of people we can observe prior to admission. These people are now sat on the AMU, occupying the beds that they would have occupied on an observation ward, only now they are being clerked by an additional team; there is a whole host of admission paperwork; and they will inevitably stay overnight, costing the NHS an additional £600 per patient.

The media is making much of the fact that higher ED attendances are leading to overcrowding and pressures on departments. This is only partially true. Yes, there has been a steady, expected increase in attendance leading up to winter. However, the total number of ED attendances in the “worst week”, were actually lower, nationally, than a comparative week in July of this year. So why the inability to cope?

Frequently, the reason for the backlog is the occupation of ED beds and trolleys by patients who have already been referred to specialties, but are either too unstable to transfer, or there are no beds on the ward. Obviously, if someone needs monitoring, and the only monitored bed is in Resus, then we are not going to chuck them out just because they are at 4:01. This has its own issues – what do you do with these patients when you have another blue light come in?

There have been so many headlines over the past few weeks:

A&E forced to turn away patients; Patients waiting 24 hours to be seen in A&E(!); A&E closures: the meltdown…

It doesn’t take much assessment to realise that when you close down an ED, the patients that would usually attend there will need to be seen somewhere else. And yet, it seems to have come as a massive surprise to everybody that in the wake of the closure of Hammersmith ED, the surrounding hospitals have seen increased waiting times, and Northwick Park Hospital has almost consistently been on divert, causing ambulance crews to telephone ahead and take patients to other EDs in the area.

I am a huge proponent of closing dysfunctional departments. Having worked in a failing DGH last year, I strongly feel that no ED is better than a failing ED. However, there seems to have been no foresight with the closures, and the government very much seems to be expecting existing departments to pick up the slack with no extra room, resources, or staff. Yes, there are planned improvements to the services under strain, but it all feel a little perfunctory, and will likely be too little too late. Northwick Park’s escalation measures involve turning corridors into patient beds; this is not a sustainable situation.

The College of Emergency Medicine has produced several recommendations for fixing our ailing EDs. One of these is the STEP programme, which is basically common sense. It states that there needs to be higher staffing levels, more inpatient beds to free up ED assessment trolleys, and better access to, and knowledge of, primary care services. All of this feels a little obvious, and one wonders why there is less about how we can implement this in the media. But, I suppose, it makes a less catchy headline than “A&E 4 hour wait crisis”.